There is a good deal more than just a touch of irony in the fact that
the radical
feminint liberation movement, which in its advocacy of abortion
on demand made much of its desire to set career- focused women free
from the burden of rearing children, has implicitly
validated a war on baby girls, a war whose ferocity is most
spectactularly on display in Asia. The cover illustration for
the March 6th issue of The Economist,
the prestigious British weekly that is often sympathetic to causes that
are dear to the left, consisted simply of a screaming headline: GENDERCIDE: WHAT
HAPPENED TO 100 MILLION BABY GIRLS? The table of contents
listed two major reports on the practice, widespread today in Asia, of KILLING BABY GIRLS,
before or even after
birth, in the interests of making room in the family for a son or sons,
particularly in those Asian countries where family size is severely
limited by popular choice or by government mandate.

May I share with you one of those articles, extensively abridged to
accommodate our restrictions of space.

*
*
*
* *

The
Worldwide War on Baby Girls From: The
Economist, March 6, 2010

Xinran Xue, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in
the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. "We
had scarcely sat down in the kitchen", she writes, "when we heard a
moan of pain from the bedroom next door .... The cries from the inner
room grew louder- and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a
man's gruff voice said accusingly: 'Useless thing!'"

"Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind
me," Miss Xinran remembers. "To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot
poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby
alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two
policemen who had accompanied me held my shoulders in a firm grip.
'Don't move, you can't save it, it's too late.' "But that's ... murder
... and you're the police!' The little foot was still now. The
policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. 'Doing a baby girt is
not-a big thing around here,' an older woman said comfortingly.
'That's a living child,"
I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. 'It's NOT a child,'
she corrected me. 'It's a girl baby, and
we can't keep it.
Around these parts, you can't get by without a son. Girl babies don't
count.'"

In January,
2010 the Chinese Academy of Social Services (CASS) showed what
can happen to a country when girl babies don't count. Within ten years, the
academy said, one in five young men would be unable to find a bride
because of a dearth of young women-a figure unprecedented in a country
at peace.

The number is based on the sexual discrepancy
among people aged 19 and below. According to CASS China in 2020 will
have 30 million to 40 million more men of this age than young women.
For comparison, there are 23 million boys below the age of 20 in
Germany, France and Britain COMBINED and
around 40 million American
boys and young men. So within ten years,
China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the WHOLE young
male population of America, or TWICE that of Europe's three largest
countries, with little prospect of marriage, untethered to a
home of their own and without the stake in society that marriage and
children provide.

Gendercide-to
borrow the title of a 1985 book by Mary Anne Warren-is often seen as an
unintended consequence of China's one-child policy, or as a product of
poverty or ignorance. But that cannot be the whole story. The surplus
of bachelors---called in China guanggun,
or "bare branches"-seems
to have accelerated between 1990 and 2005, in ways not obviously
linked to the one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979. And, as
is becoming clear, the
war against baby girls is not confined to China.

Parts of
-India have sex ratios as skewed as anything in its northern neighbor.
Other East Asian countries-South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan- have
peculiarly high numbers of MALE births. So, since the collapse
of the Soviet Union,
have former communist countries in the Caucasus and the western Balkans.
Even subsets
of America's
population are following suit, though not the
population as a
whole.

The real cause, argues Nick Eberstadt, a demographer at the American
Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, is not any
country's particular policy but "the fateful
collision between overweening
SON preference, the use of rapidly spreading prenatal sex-determination
technology and declining fertility." These are global trends. And the
SELECTIVE destruction of baby GIRLS is global, too.

Boys are
slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more
boys are born than girls so there will be equal numbers of young men
and women at puberty. In all societies that record births,
between 103 and 106 boys are normally born
for every 100 girls. The ratio has been so
stable over time that it appears to be the natural order of things.

That order
has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years. In China, the sex ratio
for the generation born between 1985 and 1989 was 108, already just
outside the natural range. For the generation born in 2000-04, it was
124 (ie., 124 boys, were born in those years for every 100 girls).
According to CASS the ratio today is 123 boys per 100girls. These rates
are biologically impossible without human intervention.

The national averages hide astonishing figures at
the PROVINCLAL level. According to an analysis of Chinese
household data carried out in late 2005 and reported in the British Medical Journal, only one region, Tibet,
has a sex ratio within the bounds of nature. Fourteen provinces-mostly
in the east and south-have sex ratios at birth of 120 and above, and
THREE have unprecedented levels of more than 130. As CASS says, "the
gender imbalance has been growing wider year after year."

The BMJ [British Medical Journal]
study also casts light on one of the puzzles about China's sexual
imbalance. How far has it been exaggerated by the presumed practice of
not reporting the birth of baby daughters in the hope of getting
another shot at bearing a son? Not much, the authors think. If this
explanation were correct, you would expect to find sex ratios falling
precipitously as girls who had been hidden at birth
start entering the official registers on attending school or
the doctor. In fact, there is no such fall. The sex ratio of
15-year-olds in 2005 was not far from the sex ratio at birth in 1990. The implication is that
SEX-SELECTIVE ABORTION, not under-registration of girls, accounts for
the excess of boys.

Other
countries have widely skewed sex ratios WITHOUT China's
draconian population controls. Taiwan's sex ratio also rose from just
above normal in 1980 to 110 in the early 1990s; it remains just below
that level today. During the same period, South Korea's sex ratio
rose from just above normal to 117 in 1990--then the highest in the
world-before falling back to more natural levels. Both these
countries were already rich, growing quickly and becoming more highly
educated even while the balance between the sexes was swinging sharply
towards males.

South Korea is experiencing some surprising consequences.
The surplus of bachelors in a rich country has sucked in brides from
abroad. In 2008,
11 % of marriages were "mixed", mostly between a Korean man and a
foreign woman. This is causing tensions in a hitherto
homogenous society, which is often hostile to the children of mixed
marriage. The
trend is especially marked in rural areas, where the government
thinks half
the children of farm households will be mixed by 2020. The children are
common enough to have produced a new word: "Kosians", or Korean-Asians.

China is nominally a communist country, but elsewhere it was
communism's collapse that was associated with the growth of sexual
disparities. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, there was an
upsurge in the ratio of boys to girls in Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia. Their sex ratios rose from normal levels in 1991 to 115-120 by
2000. A rise also occurred in several Balkan states after the wars of
Yugoslav succession. The ratio in Serbia and Macedonia is around 108.
There are even signs of distorted sex ratios in America, among
various groups of Asian-Americans. In 1975, calculates Mr.
Eberstadt, the sex ratio for Chinese-, Japanese- and Filipino-Americans
was between 100 and 106. In 2002, it was 107 to 109.

But the
country with the most remarkable record is that other supergiant,
India. India does not produce figures for sex ratios at birth,
so its numbers are not strictly comparable with the others. But there
is no doubt that the number of boys has been rising relative to girls
and that, as in China, there are large
regional disparities. The northwestern states of Punjab and
Haryna have sex rations as high at the provinces of China's east and
south. Nationally, the ratio for children up to six years of age rose
from a biologically unexceptionably 104 in 1981 to a biologically
impossible 108 in 2001. In 1991, there was a
SINGLE district with a sex ratio over 125, by 2001, there were 46.

Conventional wisdom about such disparities is that they are the result
of "backward thiinking" in old-fashioned societies or-in China-of the
one-child policy. By implication, reforming the policy or modernizing
the society (by, for example, enhancing the status of women) should
bring the sex ratio back to normal. But this is not always true and,
where it is, the road to normal sex ratios is winding and bumpy.

Not all
TRADITIONAL societies show a marked preference for sons over daughters.
But in those that DO--especially those in which the family line
passes through the son and in which he is supposed to look after his
parents in old age-a
son is worth more than a daughter. A girl is deemed to have
joined her husband's family on marriage, and is lost to her parents. As
a Hindu saying puts it, "Raising a daughter is like watering your
neighbors' garden" Son
preference is discemible--overwheming, even-in polling evidence.
In 1999 the government of India asked women what sex they wanted their
next child to be. One third of those without children said a son,
two-thirds had no preference and only a residual said a daughter. Polls
carried out in Pakistan and Yemen show similar results. Mothers in some
developing countries say they want sons, not daughters, by margins of
ten to one. In China midwives charge more for delivering a son
than a daughter....

Until the 1980s people in poor countries could do little about this
preference: before birth, nature took its course. But in that decade, ultrasound scanning and
other methods of detecting the sex of a child before birth began
to make their appearance. These technologies
changed everything. Doctors in India started advertising ultrasound
scans with the slogan "Pay 5,000 rupees ($110) today and save 50,000
rupees tomorrow" (the saving was on the cost of a daughter's
dowry). Parents who wanted a son, but balked at killing baby daughters
[after their birth] chose abortion in their
millions.

The use of sex-selective
abortion was banned in India in 1994 and in China in 1995. It is illegal in most
countries (though Sweden legalized the practice in 2009). But
since it is almost impossible to prove that an
abortion has been carried out for reasons of sex
selection, the practice remains widespread. An ultrasound scan costs
about $12, which is within the scope of many-perhaps most-Chinese and
Indian families. In
one hospital in Punjab, in northern India, the only girls born after a
round of ultrasound scans had been mistakenly identified as boys, or
else had a male twin.

The spread of fetal-imaging technology has not only skewed the sex
ratio but also explains what would otherwise be something of a puzzle:
sexual disparities tend to rise with income and education, which you
would not expect if "backward thinking" was all that mattered. In India, some of the
most prosperous states-Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat-have the
worst sex ratios. In China, the higher a province's literacy rate, the
more skewed its sex ratio. The ratio also rises
with income per head.

In Punjab Monica Das Gupta of the World Bank discovered that second and
third daughters of well-educated mothers were more than twice as likely
to die before their fifth birthday as their brothers, regardless of
their birth order. The discrepancy was far lower in poorer households.
Ms. Das Gupta argues that women do not necessarily use improvements in
education and income to help daughters. Richer, well-educated families share their
poorer neighbors'. preference for sons and, because they tend to have
smaller families, come under greater pressure to produce a son and heir
if their first child is an unlooked-for daughter.

So modernization and rising incomes make it easier and more desirable
to select the sex of your children. And on top of that smaller families
combine with greater wealth to reinforce the imperative to produce a
son. When families are large, at least one male child will doubtless
come along to maintain the family line. But if you have only
one or two children, the birth of a daughter may be at a son's expense.
So with rising incomes and falling fertility, more and more people live
in the smaller,
richer families that are under the most pressure to produce a son.

In China the
one-child policy increases that pressure further....
Unexpectedly, though, it is the relaxation of the policy, rather than
the policy pure and simple, which explains the unnatural upsurge in the
number of boys.

Throughout human history, young men have been responsible for the vast
preponderance of crime and violence-especially single men
in countries where status and social acceptance depend on being married
and having children , as it does in China and India. A rising
population of frustrated single men spells trouble.

The crime
rate has almost doubled in China during the past 20 years of rising sex
ratios, with stories abounding of bride abduction, the trafficking of
women, rape and prostitution. A study into whether these things were
connected concluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios
accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime. In India, too,
there is a correlation between provincial crime rates and sex ratios.
In "Bare Branches", Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer gave warning
that the social
problems of biased sex ratios would lead to more authoritarian policing.
Governments, they say, "must decrease the threat to
society posed by these
young men. Increased
authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs,
smuggling and so forth can be one result."

Violence is not the only consequence.... According to the World
Health Organization, female SUICIDE rates in China are among the
highest in the world (as are South Korea's). Suicide is the
commonest form of death among Chinese rural women aged 15-34; young
mothers kill themselves by drinking agricultural fertilizers, which are
easy to come by. The
journalist Xinran Xue thinks they cannot live with the knowledge that
they have aborted or killed their baby daughters....

Over the
next generation, many of the problems associated with sex selection
will get WORSE. The social consequences will become more evident
because the boys bom in large numbers over the past decade
will reach maturity then. Meanwhile,
the practice of sex selection itself may spread because fertility rates
are continuing to fall and ultrasound scanners reach throughout the
developing world....

The
Senate version of health care reform currently being forced ahead by
congressional leaders and the White House is a bad bill that will
result in bad law. It does not deserve, nor does it have, the support
of the Catholic bishops of our country. Nor does the American public
want it. As I write this column on March 14, the Senate bill remains
gravely flawed. It does not meet minimum moral standards in
at least three important areas: the exclusion of abortion funding and
services; adequate conscience protections for health care professionals
and institutions; and the inclusion of immigrants.

Groups, trade
associations, and publications describing themselves as “Catholic” or
“prolife” that endorse the Senate version—whatever their intentions—are
doing a serious disservice to the nation and to the Church, undermining
the witness of the Catholic community and ensuring the failure of
genuine, ethical health care reform. By their public actions, they
create confusion at exactly the moment Catholics need to think clearly
about the remaining issues in the health care debate. They also provide
the illusion of moral cover for an unethical piece of legislation.

As we enter a critical week in the national health care debate,
Catholics need to remember a few simple facts.

First,
the Catholic bishops of the United States have pressed for real
national health care reform in this country for more than half a
century. They began long before either political party or the public
media found it convenient. That commitment hasn’t changed. Nor will it.

Second,
the bishops have tried earnestly for more than seven months to work
with elected officials to craft reform that would serve all Americans
in a manner respecting minimum moral standards. The failure of their
effort has one source. It comes entirely from the
stubbornness and evasions of certain key congressional leaders, and the
unwillingness of the White House to honor promises made by the
president last September.

Third, the health care reform debate
has never been merely a matter of party politics. Nor is it now.
Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak and a number of his Democratic
colleagues have shown extraordinary character in pushing for good
health care reform while resisting attempts to poison it with
abortion-related entitlements and other bad ideas that have nothing to
do with real health care. Many Republicans share the goal of decent
health care reform, even if their solutions would differ dramatically.
To put it another way, few persons seriously oppose making adequate
health services available for all Americans. But God, or the devil, is
in the details—and by that measure, the current Senate version of
health care reform is not merely defective, but also a dangerous
mistake.

The long, unpleasant and too often dishonest national
health care debate is now in its last days. Its most painful feature
has been those “Catholic” groups that by their eagerness for some kind
of deal undercut the witness of the Catholic community and help advance
a bad bill into a bad law. Their flawed judgment could now have
damaging consequences for all of us.

Do not be misled. The
Senate version of health care reform currently being pushed ahead by
congressional leaders and the White House—despite public resistance and
numerous moral concerns—is bad law; and not simply bad, but dangerous.
It does not deserve, nor does it have, the support of the Catholic
bishops in our country, who speak for the believing Catholic community.
In its current content, the Senate version of health care legislation
is not “reform.” Catholics and other persons of good will concerned
about the foundations of human dignity should oppose it.